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Private clouds are all the rage for businesses seeking to recreate the capabilities of Amazon's infrastructure-as-a-service cloud within their own data centers. One of the first organizations to build its own private cloud was NASA, which started working on the "Nebula" cloud in 2008. Now the people who built that cloud will sell you one very much like it.

Founded by the architects of NASA's Nebula project (now called OpenStack), the appropriately named vendor Nebula today announced general availability of its first product, Nebula One.

Nebula (the company) is headed by ex-NASA Chief Technology Officer for IT Chris Kemp and ex-NASA engineer Devin Carlen, who both helped create and build the Nebula technology. Kemp is Nebula's CEO and Carlen is Nebula's CTO.

NASA's Nebula technology eventually merged with a Rackspace project and became OpenStack, open source software that turns commodity servers into Amazon-like clouds. Naturally, the Nebula company's hardware incorporates the OpenStack software as well as Nebula's own proprietary "Cosmos" software.

Like Amazon Web Services, a Nebula cloud lets users grab all the server and storage resources they need, scaling up and down as necessary, while running the hardware entirely inside the customer's data center.

"Nebula One allows you to start with the compute and storage you need today, and scale seamlessly across multiple racks tomorrow," the company states. "This is achieved through a simple, expandable architecture that presents itself as a single system on your network. The Nebula Cosmos cloud operating system offers a rich, intuitive graphical interface for users at any level. For developers, Nebula Cosmos implements APIs from OpenStack and Amazon Web Services so they can leverage their knowledge of public cloud services."

The core hardware is the Nebula Cloud Controller, a 2U-sized appliance with a 16-core processor and 64GB of RAM. Storage options include a 1TB 7,200-RPM hard drive, a 256GB MLC SSD drive, and a 32GB SuperCache MLC mSATA Drive.

One controller can administer up to 20 servers. A cluster can have up to five controllers and thus up to 100 servers. Example configurations listed on the Nebula website start at 64 cores with 384GB of memory and 96TB of storage, and move up to 1,600 cores, 9,600GB of memory, and 2,400TB of storage.

We don't have a full price list, but Nebula told Ars that each controller costs at least $100,000, with the price going up depending on the configuration. Nebula sells only the controller, so the customers must buy the servers, and those servers must be on the list of certified devices to work in a Nebula network. Thus far, the only certified models are the HP DL380p Gen 8 and Dell PowerEdge R720xd, with an IBM server going through testing.

"We have just launched, so this list is going to grow as we certify more servers," a Nebula spokesperson said.

Nebula was founded in 2011, and landed at least one big customer even before announcing general availability. Xerox's PARC laboratory "has selected Nebula to power their private cloud infrastructure," Nebula said.

Not coincidentally, Nebula isn't the only OpenStack vendor founded by former members of the NASA Nebula project. A company called Piston, founded in 2011 by the technical architect for NASA's Nebula cloud, sells software that helps businesses deploy OpenStack networks.